UK top target for spammers

We get 25% of global total of Nigerian spam emails

1 July 2008 13:40 GMT / By Katie Scott

It seems the UK is being singled out and targeted by money scams in spam emails, many of which come from Nigeria.

UK surfers receive nearly a quarter of the global total of Nigerian spam emails, says a new survey from McAfee.

The security specialist surveyed 50 volunteers monitoring their email across 10 countries for 30 days.

It found that internet users in the UK get 23% of the global total of money scam emails.

The emails tend to promise the recipient financial rewards in return for bank account details or a small amount of money.

In fact, emails leading to financial fraud are the most common types of spam worldwide - either in the form of phishing emails (that try and get sensitive information out of the recipient) or relating to offers of loans and mortgages.

These sorts of emails account for 16% of all mails in the UK.

"I think we can see from the experiment that spam is undeniably linked to cybercrime, however it is such an immense problem and it’s never going to go away.

"It’s no longer a question of solving it, but one of managing it", said Dave De Walt, chief executive of McAfee